Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a hereditary blood disorder, affecting over 75,000 people in the United States. Sickle cell disease (SCD) affects over twenty million people throughout the world and is particularly common among those whose ancestors come from sub-Saharan Africa, Spanish-speaking regions in the Western Hemisphere (South America, the Caribbean, and Central America), Saudi Arabia, India, and Mediterranean countries such as Turkey, Greece, and Italy.
In the US, those with SCD have an average mortality in their 40s, a poor quality of life and high medical costs. In SCD, a mutation in .beta.-globin (glu6val) causes deoxygenated sickle hemoglobin (deoxy-HbS) to form insoluble polymers inside red blood cells (RBCs), which deforms the RBCs into rigid shapes or sickle cells that occlude capillaries and small blood vessels. The only disease-modifying drug approved for use in SCD patients is hydroxyurea, an anti-cancer drug. Not all patients respond to hydroxyurea, and it can be poorly tolerated causing myelosuppression in some patients. Despite extensive studies on SCD by researchers over several decades, there has been little progress in the development of additional disease modifying agents. Therefore, new, safer and more effective therapeutic anti-sickling agents are needed to treat patients with SCD, particularly children, which could improve the quality of life, increase the life expectancies of sufferers of this disease, and reduce the estimated 100,000 hospitalizations and $500 million in direct hospital costs due to sickle cell disease in the United States. Sickle cell disease occurs in about 1 in every 500 African American births, and about 1 in 12 African Americans has sickle cell trait. The morbidity and mortality factors associated with sickle cell disease are well known and the acute and chronic trauma of the painful episodes is indescribable. In view of these realities, there is a desperate need for drugs or agents that could alleviate and mitigate the effects of this terrible disease.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,819 describes a composition requiring extracts from at least four plant materials for treating sickle cell disease. U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,819 does not describe Sorghum bicolor, per se, having anti-sickling activity nor measure the anti-sickling activity of Sorghum bicolor. It only describes the anti-sickling activity of the four ingredients mixed together. The present invention provides a distinctly different and improved plant formulation using Sorghum bicolor plant material, per se, that shows potent anti-sickling activity against human sickle cells and is simpler to formulate.